Re: 'git commit' duplicates parents?

On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Btw, if possibly, you should just undo it. It's "valid" in the sense that having the same parent duplicated will just be considered to be a merge by a paritcularly strange person, but it's definitely not good practice, and since it _is_ technically a merge, programs that avoid showing merges (like "git-whatchanged" - because it doesn't know what it should show as the "difference") won't show it.

Other programs, like "git-diff-tree -m", which show _all_ sides of a merge, will show the diff twice (because it shows the diff against all parents). Which is also why you see it twice in your git-changes-script.

Again, "git commit" _did_ warn about this, I'm sure, but I actually see why that stupid MERGE_HEAD file was there - a null merge won't remove a stale MERGE_HEAD, so it's probably because you did a "git pull" that was a trivial merge, and that would have left that turd around..

		Linus